By Sydney Maria
People online can garner thousands—even millions (especially on TikTok)—of views for talking about books.
As someone who has spent years getting recommendations from other readers online, I understand the appeal of watching videos about books. It was one of the things that propelled my love of reading as a young teen, and sustained it into adulthood, even at times when I wasn’t an active reader.
I believe one of the reasons that bookstores aren’t obsolete (as so many people have postulated), is because of social media and how it has changed the landscape of book culture. People crave the tangible, especially in an increasingly digitalized world. While e-readers are still prominent because of subscriptions like Kindle Unlimited, a huge part of BookTube and BookTok centers around buying and collecting physical books.
In the early days of BookTube, bookshelf tours were extremely popular, and they still have an audience, but other types of videos have grown in popularity as well, like book unboxing hauls where viewers watch creators open boxes upon boxes of different books to sit on their shelves. The consumerist aspect of the book community is one that many people criticize, especially when purchasing from sites like Amazon rather than from independent bookstores. There is a very serious hivemind within the book community to emulate popular content creators: buying hundreds of books every year in order to keep pace turns reading into a competition. And when they fail to read the four or five books a week that content creators do, given that most people don’t make their living from being a content creator, they can end up feeling inadequate. This is a very real criticism of the way BookTube and BookTok commodify the reading experience. For most of us who grew up reading, it was never really about how many books we were reading. The stories were vastly more important than the quantity of books. What does it matter how many books you’ve read if they were all meaningless to you? Just to reach some arbitrary goal?
While there’s some substance to this criticism, there is also the flipside: some of this criticism feels rooted in misogyny since it pertains to the largely female audience of readers who enjoy fast-paced, light-hearted, and “easy” books. There is a common occurrence where things liked by a majority female demographic get criticized for being “bad,” “stupid,” or “mindless,” and it can be frustrating to see these same sentiments over and over again in the spaces I frequent and enjoy, especially when male content creators often garner ten times the views of their female counterparts. The women whose videos I’ve watched since I was a teenager, like PeruseProject, MelReads, and Jaime’s Library, were once young girls who found solace in discussing the YA, romance, and paranormal books that were seen as less than and they only have a fraction of the audience of their male counterparts. I don’t mean to discredit the content made by men in the book community, they have interesting and eye-catching video ideas, but it’s hard not to feel some disappointment seeing the different treatment a male creator gets in a female-led space. Still, these communities have encouraged more people to read. They have enticed people with thoughtful reviews and recommendations. Sure, many of the books recommended on these platforms, especially TikTok, are the same lists regurgitated over and over again, but sometimes it’s people’s first time hearing about these books. So, while these critiques can be made, as well as analyzed introspectively, I will always support exposing more people to reading.
Italics Mine 